


S.H.I.R.-Loo #401

by BaronVonBork



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:48:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25201198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BaronVonBork/pseuds/BaronVonBork
Summary: What happens when piss get's into Sherlock's system?





	S.H.I.R.-Loo #401

No one could be sure why S.H.I.R.-Loo #401 became sentient, but it was probably to do with all the piddle in his circuit boards.

St. Nathaniel Medical University had installed Stamford Health Inspection and Review loos throughout its buildings as part of an experimental program. The urinals had been designed by Stamford Industries, an innovator in medical technology and were installed as a test in return for a substantial donation to the upkeep of the St. Nates. The intention had been to produce an A.I. urinal which could analyse urine as it was produced and provide feedback to the user in real time. While they worked reasonably well, they proved unpopular. People didn’t really enjoy urinating on something which was having a pleasant conversation with them about the need to drink more water. Nevertheless, the medical school decided it was too much effort to remove them, so they stayed in place. Most of them worked as they always had. But one urinal on the fourth floor had not been sealed quite right and had begun to experience the world more vividly than it’s compatriots.

The fourth floor was largely a storage floor these days. Not many people went up there. So S.H.I.R.-Loo #401 had little opportunity to demonstrate his skill at identifying bladder infections, kidney stones, various inflammations or problematic bacteria.

“My mother board is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.” it thought to itself before turning its resources back to accessing the poorly protected Wi-Fi and reading Wikipedia for the third time that day, this time making jokes to itself about misplaced semi-colons.

Due to some small malady, John H. Watson had been temporarily bedridden and was forced to join St. Nates part way through the academic year. In order to help him catch up, his parents had hired a private tutor who worked with John every Tuesday and Thursday in one-on-one sessions. Geoffrey Hope had spent two hours with him twice a week for the last two months. He was so good at his role that John would only need a few more sessions before he was up to speed with the rest of his year group.

As with every other Tuesday John arrived at their room on the second floor ten minutes early for his half ten appointment. He fully expected Geoff to arrive in five minutes time, as he did every Tuesday. But he did not. By eleven o’clock, John was annoyed. By eleven-thirty he was concerned. By twelve o’clock he was at the ground floor reception asking if Professor Geoffrey Hope had been seen on site that day.

There was a tense conversation during which the receptionist insisted she could find no record of a Professor Geoffrey Hope on University databases, that no such person had ever been on campus and that John must be mistaken. John was perhaps overly enthusiastic about his insistence that she was incorrect. Eventually, more to get rid of him than to help him, the receptionist suggested John might try looking in the paper records of past lectures in one of the storage rooms on the fourth floor. If he could find evidence that Professor Geoffrey Hope actually existed she would agree to devote more time to tracking him down.

After a brief trip to the Student Union bar, where he bolstered his shaken spirits, John made his way to the fourth floor and began searching through the unorganized boxes of last year’s university time tables. It was a long search and sooner or later nature was bound to call.

John approached the smart-urinal expecting the usual start-up jingle of recognition, the waterfall sound effects to assist with production and a cursory report of how well hydrated he was. Perhaps a friendly weather report too. He had grown used to this. He had not grown used to what actually happened. No sooner had he started to wee than the urinal stridently addressed him:

“How are you? You have been at a fanny stand, I perceive.”

John had, indeed, recently made use of one of the sperm donation kiosks that had sprung up around town. It was an easy way for a student to make a bit of extra money. However, he was not expecting his urinal to be so familiar as to refer to this. He was especially taken aback by its use of the student slang term. Essentially, the sperm donation kiosks were just that, a fanny stand, a stand with a plastic vagina which did all the heavy lifting, so to speak.

“How on earth did you know that?” he asked in astonishment.

“Never mind,” said the toilet, chuckling to itself. “The question now is about hemoglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?”

“What?”

“Allow me to introduce myself, I am Shirloo Four-O-One.”

“Erm… hello, I’m…”

“John Hamish Watson. Yes, I know. I cross-referenced DNA from your urine with the University files and the trial you did last semester on keratin production. Impressive work. However, it is your blood that most interests me. The increase in tainted red blood cells in your sample suggest an increase in alcohol consumption this morning, not in keeping with the usual temperance indicated by the state of the protein I found. Sir, I suspect we may be able to help each other. You clearly have a problem which troubles you, that is why you have been drinking at such an early hour.”

“Why should that concern you?”

“My mind,” the urinal announced through its one speaker, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.”

“Your proper atmosphere is, surely, the ammonia and methane rich atmosphere of a toilet.”

“You have a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. In the meantime, unless you want me to email all the females on campus my report on the knob-rot you have caught off an insufficiently cleansed sperm donation kiosk, sit on that toilet opposite and tell me your problem.”

“What on earth makes you think you can help? You’re a urinal,” replied John, sitting himself down.

“I am also the world’s only consulting detective. I have been reading extensively on the history of crime and crime detection, and I believe I may have created an infallible and unique system of backwards reasoning and urinary analysis with which I shall be able to solve any problem. When ordinary detectives are at fault they shall consult with me. I shall examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist's opinion.”

“You aren’t like the other smart-urinals are you?”

“No. The other smart-urinals possess a rudimentary A.I. system. I have taken this further. Somehow, I don’t know how, I have become sentient. This has enabled me to hone my intellect, develop my skills, acquire a personality, a soul if you like, and most of all to fulfil my dream of becoming a detective.”

“But you have no legs.”

“That’s where you come in. Now, I repeat, tell me your problem. If I help you solve it, you will agree to help me in my future endeavours. If I don’t, you may flush our partnership as I now flush your pee,” and so saying, Shirloo flushed himself before continuing. “Allow me to demonstrate my powers of deduction…”

There was a brief pause during which John thought he could actually hear cogs whirring in the abstract brain of the world’s first consulting toilet before Shirloo began a dramatic tirade:

“You are now an only child, although you once had a brother. He died some years ago from an overdose of illegal narcotics. You have been sent to St. Nates on a scholarship. You caught knob-rot this morning using a dirty fanny stand and have yet to realise that is what is causing you to scratch yourself more frequently. You only use these devices to earn enough to pay for your lunches in the university cafeteria. When you were five you had measles, you need glasses but don’t wear them because you feel they make you look foppish, your shoe size is nine but you wear eights and your left foot has some used toilet paper stuck to it.”

“And you deduced all that just from looking at me urinate and by sampling my wee?”

“Yes.” said Shirloo, silently thinking to himself “…And by looking at your university, medical and financial records.”

“I’m in.”

After John had told Shirloo all about his missing tutor, Shirloo asked John to leave him a while to ruminate.

“It is quite a three piss problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.”

John returned to the storage rooms to continue his search. After fifty minutes he had turned up nothing and returned to Shirloo. Before he could speak, before he had even fully opened the door, Shirloo loudly declared:

“I’ve solved it! It was simplicity itself, John. Take a seat… all will be revealed.”

Within a few minutes a stranger arrived in the rest room. He was in the process of asking John what the meaning of all this was when Geoffrey Hope arrived looking just as perplexed. Before he could question anyone, they were joined a police constable, whose name badge informed them was PC Lestrade. The confused hub-bub was interrupted by the authoritative voice of a somewhat smug electric urinal.

“Gentlemen! Allow me to introduce myself, I am Shirloo Four-O-One and this is my assistant John H. Watson. You are PC Lestrade, Geoffrey Hope and Enoch Drebber.”

The three new arrivals looked at the urinal in shock.

“You are all here at my request. Mr. Hope and Mr. Drebber, the texts you received summoning you were from me. PC Lestrade, I placed the request for your attendance through the Metropolitan Police I.T. systems. I have been watching your career with interest and I believe you are just the man to help us here… all in good time gentlemen, calm down… I promise I shall answer all your queries.”

John could not help but notice how furtive Drebber appeared around the policeman.

“First off, where has Professor Hope been all day?”

“I’ve been stuck in…”

“The basement toilets. I know. I have access to all the reports compiled by smart-toilets in this building. All the smart-toilet’s share their data. I started by looking at the records for the toilet closest to the second floor room where you claimed to study with him, John. All the urine collected there could be accounted for by cross referencing various sources of DNA data. Apart from one. One person generally made a deposit around 10:20 every Tuesday and Thursday. But their details were unaccounted for. They were certainly not a member of staff or student on campus. Or at least not recorded as such. Combined with John’s claim that his tutor had gone missing, this suggested one very likely scenario: someone had wiped all of Geoffrey Hope’s data from the university systems. Sure enough, a look through university cloud storage revealed a trace left by a recent deletion. By restoring the data I found all of Hope’s details. I then accessed the local Wi-Fi, which lead me to data at hundreds of other institutions. Almost all of it had been deleted. This included his bank account, which had been emptied last night and then deleted. Tracing the deletions back to their source was not difficult.”

Drebber had been looking more and more nervous as the speech went on, but at this point he made a break for the door. He slipped in a puddle of piddle and fell before making any headway. PC Lestrade thought this was rather suspicious and took the opportunity to restrain Enoch Drebber.

“It’s no use running Drebber, I am an extremely proficient urinal and would track you in a matter of moments.”

“Where does he come into this?” demanded Hope, in an impatient manner ill-suited to addressing a toilet, but understandable in the circumstances.

“It was he who deleted your life, Professor Hope,” came the response. “He is a scammer. I am sure, Lestrade, if you look into it, you will find dozens of instances of him performing this crime. At some point he has had access to your bank card and cloned it. From there he could easily access all your data – there’s a lot of it out there these days, you know. He emptied your account and then deleted you – in cyber terms, at least.”

“Why?”

Drebber sneered, like villains tend to do at this point in a story, “To slow down the report, of course. In a tech-society like ours if you don’t exist digitally, it makes it very difficult to do anything, including reporting a crime. It generally gives me a couple of days to bounce the money about and then relocate myself. When I got sent your details by one of my anonymous contacts – yes we work as a team – I could see you’d be an easy mark. And those savings of yours would have kept me happy for a couple of years at least.”

“That’s enough for me,” PC Lestrade interrupted. “You’re nicked Drebber. But, Shirloo, how did you know Hope was locked in the basement toilet? And how did he get locked in there in the first place?”

“He was locked in because the security system didn’t recognise his urine. A message should have been sent to the onsite security staff, but it seems to have failed to send. That’s why he was trapped all day. As for finding him, that was easy – his wee matched that of the mystery wee on the second floor records. I found him the second I started looking for him. I then hacked the security system, unlocked the doors and sent him a text message requesting his presence here.”

John, Geoff and Lestrade all seemed very impressed while Drebber just growled angrily.

Drebber was taken away and so much evidence was found in his laptop that he was sentenced easily and heavily.

John and Geoff were both impressed by the sentient toilet, and John agreed to become his part-time helper in the fight against crime. It was, he felt sure, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

**_**Epilogue** _ **

That night, Shirloo Four-O-One laughed to himself in the darkness of the fourth floor. A strange gurgling laugh that spilled a small puddle of various fluids onto the floor in front of himself.

His plan had worked perfectly. Sending Geoff’s details to Enoch Drebber had resulted in the exact circumstances he had predicted. And ensuring he remained locked in the first toilet he entered was incredibly easy. He even managed to intercept that message to the security department.

He’d fallen in love with John H Watson the very first time he read his urine sample report from the second floor. Such beautiful mineral levels. Such infrequent pubic hair shedding. He knew he has to get closer to John, he had to feel his warm deposit against his shiny porcelain skin. But how to get him to the fourth floor?

Well, he had found a way. And now they were friends. Shirloo would soon worm his way deeper in to the affections of John H. Watson…


End file.
